More about Clare Stead

Clare Stead is an educator with a passion for enriching children’s lives through creative and engaging learning experiences and innovations. With over 30 years of educational expertise in both classroom teaching and active research, Clare brings a wealth of knowledge and a deep commitment to early childhood development.

As a qualified primary school teacher, researcher, and e-learning specialist, Clare has dedicated her career to ensuring that children have the opportunity to reach their full potential and thrive. Her most recent venture, Oliiki, focuses on learning and development in the critical first 1000 days of a child’s life. The Oliiki app supports parents, parents-to-be, and early years practitioners in sparking babies’ adventures in learning from conception to two. The Oliiki app offers evidence-based, age-appropriate, easy-to-do activities to engage parents and educators in using tiny playful adventures to build babies’ brains and parenting confidence in the earliest days.

Prior to Oliiki, Clare served as the Education Director and Chief Product Officer at Mwabu (formerly iSchool) in Zambia, where she designed and developed a fully immersive experiential learning system for the Zambian primary school system. This innovative solution, now being implemented across Africa, provides planned lessons for every grade, subject, and day of the year for the whole primary age range in 9 languages. By shifting from rote learning to inquiry-based active teaching and learning, Mwabu empowers teachers and places children at the centre of their education.

Clare’s work at Mwabu garnered recognition and numerous awards, and she regularly delivered keynote speeches and shared best practices at conferences and events throughout Africa and the UK. She also contributed to the University of Cambridge-funded project ‘OER4Schools,’ which focused on developing open educational resources and teacher professional development.